"Cynical" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... permission to protect her if there was need. Moreover, since they had been forced to tread on dangerous ground, he had handled the situation with courage. She might require a friend, and his honest sympathy was refreshing by contrast with the attitude of her father's companions. Some were hard and cynical and some were dissipated, but all were stamped by a repugnant greediness. They sought something: money, the gratification of base desires, success in dark intrigue. Jake with his chivalrous generosity stood far apart from them; but he must be saved ...
— Brandon of the Engineers • Harold Bindloss
... a cynical laugh. "You're easy to gull," he said; "why, when it serves my purpose I can lie like ...
— Dusty Diamonds Cut and Polished - A Tale of City Arab Life and Adventure • R.M. Ballantyne
... has come to me. I worship Dicky. He sweeps me off my feet with his love, his vivid personality overpowers my more commonplace self, but through all the bewildering intoxication of my engagement and marriage a little mocking devil, a cool, cynical, little devil, is constantly whispering in my ear: "You fool, you fool, to imagine you can escape unhappiness! There is no such thing as a ...
— Revelations of a Wife - The Story of a Honeymoon • Adele Garrison
... use some very plain language. [Cheers.] I may, perhaps, preface what I have to say by the observation that it does not come upon us as a surprise. [Cheers.] This war began on the part of Germany with the cynical repudiation [cheers] of a solemn treaty on the avowed grounds that when a nation's interests required it, right and good faith must give way to force. ["Hear, hear!"] The war has been carried on, therefore, with a systematic—not ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... stream. He witnessed some impudent comedies of Dryden, Etherege, and Sedley. But it is important to note that he formed a low opinion of all of them. Their intellectual glitter did not appeal to him. Their cynical licentiousness seemed to him to be merely "silly." One might have anticipated from him a different verdict on the frank obscenity of Restoration drama. But there are the facts. Neither did Mr Pepys, nor (he ...
— Shakespeare and the Modern Stage - with Other Essays • Sir Sidney Lee
... Seward was wearing a most gloomy expression of countenance; Secretary of War Stanton was savage and inclined to be morose; Secretary of the Treasury Chase was indifferent and cynical, while the others of the Presidential advisers resigned themselves to the hearing of the ...
— Lincoln's Yarns and Stories • Alexander K. McClure
... in a few seconds. The man was unchanged. The boy alone was altered. Rochester's hair was a little grayer, perhaps, but his face was still smooth. His out-of-door life and that wonderful mouth of his, with its half humorous, half cynical curve, still kept his face young. To the boy had come a change much more marked and evident. He was a boy no longer—not even a youth. He carried himself with the assured bearing of a man of the world. His thick black ...
— The Moving Finger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... treated the baronet with such shy gentle womanliness, her girlish pity struggling through the Highland pride, forgetting in the suffering man the dastard who had wronged her, that he was moved not a little from his cynical ironic gayety. She was in a peculiar relation toward us, one lacking the sanction of society and yet quite natural. I had fought for her, and her warm heart forbade her to go her way and leave me to live or die as chance might will. As she would move about the room ministering to ...
— A Daughter of Raasay - A Tale of the '45 • William MacLeod Raine
... had crushed my mother to death, and robbed me of my birthright. Even before that night, I never loved him. I thought it very wicked of me, but I never could love him. As he spoke to you and grew cynical, I began to loathe and despise him. I can't tell you how great a comfort it was to me to know—to hear from his own lips I was not that ...
— Recalled to Life • Grant Allen
... Duane Mallett seemed to be his gaily cynical willingness to respond to any advance, however slight, that any pretty woman offered. This responsive partiality was disconcerting enough to make him dreaded by ambitious mothers, and an object of uneasy interest to their decorative offspring who were inclined ...
— The Danger Mark • Robert W. Chambers
... these only an intimate few—had understood that beneath that self-same lazy manner, those shy and awkward ways, that half-inane, half-cynical laugh, there now lurked an undercurrent of ...
— The Elusive Pimpernel • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... back and watched the crowd with a smile half cynical, half amused. Some of the visitors were regular hangers-on, who perhaps expected an invitation to dine; some were seekers of patronage; some had an eye to political preferment, a few were real acquaintances of Calatinus or came on ...
— A Friend of Caesar - A Tale of the Fall of the Roman Republic. Time, 50-47 B.C. • William Stearns Davis
... sort of thing often?' asked Ida, with rather a cynical air. 'You talk as if it were a common ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... stood silent, not a little awed, and indeed imposed on, by the cynical and worldly-wise tone which their ...
— Hereward, The Last of the English • Charles Kingsley
... and disillusioning experiences in public life, to maintain without sentimentality a genuine and persistent interest in the welfare of others. Those in whom the fund of human kindness is slender will, and easily do, become cynical and hard. ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman
... no!" cried John Saltram, with a wry face; "it is the romance of reality I deal with. My book is a Life of Jonathan Swift. He was always a favourite study of mine, you know, that brilliant, unprincipled, intolerant, cynical, irresistible, miserable man. Scott's biography seems to me to give but a tame picture, and others are only sketches. Mine will be a pre-Raphaelite study—faithful as a photograph, careful as a miniature on ...
— Fenton's Quest • M. E. Braddon
... published one of Johnson's letters, in which he wrote—at all events she says he wrote:—'Poor B——i! do not quarrel with him; to neglect him a little will be sufficient. He means only to be frank, and manly, and independent, and perhaps, as you say, a little wise. To be frank he thinks is to be cynical, and to be independent is to be rude. Forgive him, dearest lady, the rather because of his misbehaviour I am afraid he learnt part of me. I hope to set him hereafter a better example.' Piozzi Letters, ...
— The Life Of Johnson, Volume 3 of 6 • Boswell
... instead, but without incurring the charge of rudeness. Why she was making such an attack upon him, was beyond his understanding, but he resented it, and made up his mind neither to fly nor yield. If he had been a hundredth part as cynical as he liked to fancy himself, he would have acted very differently. But he was young enough to have been wounded by his former dismissal, though he hardly knew it, and to seek almost instinctively to revenge his wrongs. ...
— Don Orsino • F. Marion Crawford
... drowned by the beating of her own arteries. She saw only the blue eyes that flashed above her, felt only the warmth of that throbbing hand which held hers and which the blood of his heart fed. Dimly, as in a dream, she saw the drooping shoulders, high white forehead and tight, cynical mouth of the man she was to marry in December. For an hour she had been crowding back the memory of that face with all ...
— A Collection of Stories, Reviews and Essays • Willa Cather
... about him. Garstin's instinct for people had not betrayed him. Although later Arabian's craft had puzzled even him he had summed up Arabian at a first glance. Garstin was diabolically clever. If only he were less hard, less brutally cynical, she might perhaps go to him now. For he had in his peculiar way warned her against Arabian. She flushed in the dark as she thought of Garstin's probable comments on her situation if he knew of it! And yet Garstin had told her that Arabian was in love with her. Was that ...
— December Love • Robert Hichens
... from you who in your judicial capacity have never shown mercy to anyone. You know full well that all the faults of this child of mine are due entirely to me. You know that my cruelty has made life a wilderness to him and filled him with cynical bitterness—he who was always so tender-hearted that even an angry look was pain to him. Behold, sir! the one man who could venture to insult you with impunity now lies in the dust before you, ...
— The Day of Wrath • Maurus Jokai
... confidences, and, with French exuberant recognition of sentiment, thought them the incarnation of Love. Something in their manifest equality of condition kept even the vainest and most susceptible of spectators from attempted rivalry or cynical interruption. And when at last they dropped side by side on a sun-warmed stone bench on the terrace, and Helen, inclining her brown head towards her companion, informed him of the difficulty she had experienced ...
— Tales of Trail and Town • Bret Harte
... be sharper, very possibly, than that of a philosopher's jackknife. A mind a little off its balance, one which has a slightly squinting brain as its organ; will often prove fertile in suggestions. Vulgar, cynical, contemptuous listeners fly at all its weaknesses, and please themselves with making light of its often futile ingenuities, when a wiser audience would gladly accept a hint which perhaps could be developed in some profitable direction, or so interpret an erratic thought that ...
— Over the Teacups • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... a hermit. A man yet young, erect, well-dressed, clean-shaven, with a low voice, and a smile half melancholy, half cynical, was scarcely the conventional idea of a solitary. His dwelling, a rude improvement on a fisherman's cabin, had all the severe exterior simplicity of frontier architecture, but within it was comfortable and wholesome. Three rooms—a kitchen, a living room, and ...
— Drift from Two Shores • Bret Harte
... Sam," she said coldly. "You say that because you are becoming hard and cold and cynical. Your friend Morrison talked from his heart. It was beautiful. Men like you, who have a strong influence over him, may lead him away, but in the end a man like that will come to give his life to the service of society. You should help him; ...
— Windy McPherson's Son • Sherwood Anderson
... of breathless waiting. Then they bawled, "Second district!" In a flash the company of indolent and cynical young men had vanished like a ...
— The Monster and Other Stories - The Monster; The Blue Hotel; His New Mittens • Stephen Crane
... not long, but the earnestness of the preacher was very real. The effect on his audience was varied. Most of them sympathised deeply, and seemed to listen as much with eyes as ears. A few, who had not come there for religious purposes, wore somewhat cynical, even scornful, expressions at first, but these were partially subdued by the manner of the speaker as he reasoned of spiritual things and the world ...
— The Young Trawler • R.M. Ballantyne
... article out of Elm Court," said Waymark. "Semi-descriptive, semi-reflective, wholly cynical Maybe it will pay for my summer holiday. And, apropos of the same subject, I've got great ideas. This introduction to such phases of life will prove endlessly advantageous to me, artistically speaking. Let me get a little more experience, and I will write ...
— The Unclassed • George Gissing
... morning—he were, after all, to escape, he would not rest until he had made his discovery. Some new life was stirring within him. He wanted now to fling himself amongst men; he would play football, he would take his place in the college, he would test everything—leave no stone unturned. No longer a cynical observer, he would be an adventurer . . . if they would let ...
— The Prelude to Adventure • Hugh Walpole
... Bill was approaching second-reading Frankl introduced Harris as a member; and wide-eyed stood Harris, though still cynical, with elegant walking-stick, hat cocked, and "I sye", he whispered, "are all these ...
— The Lord of the Sea • M. P. Shiel
... Batifol's school—the grotesque and miserable teachers, the ferocious and cynical pupils, the dingy, dusty, and ink-stained rooms—saddened and displeased Amedee. Although very intelligent, he was disgusted with the sort of instruction there, which was served out in portions, like soldier's rations, and would have lost courage but for his little friend, Louise Gerard, ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... commission in his pocket, and had set up his allegorical figure of The Pacific Slope in the room where Ferris had painted his too metaphysical conception of A Venetian Priest. Mrs. Elmore had never liked Ferris; she thought him cynical and opinionated, and she believed that he had not behaved quite well towards a young American lady,—a Miss Vervain, who had stayed awhile in Venice with her mother. She was glad to have him go; but she could not admire Mr. Hoskins, who, however ...
— A Fearful Responsibility and Other Stories • William D. Howells
... and jackdaws would chew tobacco eagerly and with true relish. A large proportion of the insecta are too light-minded and frivolous to care for smoking. Beetles, however, a very reserved and dignified race, would smoke cigars, and so would cockroaches, a rather saturnine and cynical people; ...
— Here are Ladies • James Stephens
... longer upon this first part of my subject. I wished mainly to emphasise that to begin with action, in our understanding of mercifulness, is a mistake; and that we must clear our hearts of antipathies, and antagonisms, and cynical suspicions, if we would inherit the blessings ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... should pay to the limit?" I asked, curious to see how far his cynical audacity would ...
— The Pirate of Panama - A Tale of the Fight for Buried Treasure • William MacLeod Raine
... Paris and become a painter of worldwide reputation; the money his father had left him would easily suffice for his simple wants. And some day, the observed of all observers in some bright hall of gaiety, he would pass her coldly by, with a cynical smile upon his lips, and she would grow pale and totter and fall into the arms of the bloated Silenus, for whose title she had bartered ...
— The Eagle's Shadow • James Branch Cabell
... nearly the truth. I never saw Wirz when he was not angry; if not violently abusive, he was cynical and sardonic. Never, in my little experience with him did I detect a glint of kindly, generous humanity; if he ever was moved by any sight of suffering its exhibition in his face escaped my eye. If he ever had even a wish to mitigate the pain or hardship of any man the ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy
... very good friend, Dr. Jonathan Goddard, reader of the physic lectures at Gresham College, suddenly fell down dead in the street, as he was entering into a coach. He was a pretty corpulent and tall man, a bachelor between 45 and 50 years of age; he was melancholy, inclined to be cynical, and used now and then to complain of giddiness in his head. He was an excellent mathematician, and some time physician to Oliver the Protector" (John Coniers, apothecary, in Shoe Lane. MSS. Sloan. 958). The "drops" were a preparation of spirit of hartshorn, ...
— The Tatler, Volume 1, 1899 • George A. Aitken
... most unknown perhaps of all great writers, did know how; and a cynical person might echo the I nunc of the Roman satirist, and dwell on the futility of doing great things, in reference to the fact that it used to be fashionable, and is still not uncommon, to call Malory a "mere compiler." Indeed ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury
... bent over the prostrate man with a cynical laugh: one might have thought he was Satan watching the departure of a soul too ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... that day! The shining counter, the placards advertising strange mixtures with ice cream as their basis, the busy men behind the counter, the half-cynical, half-pitying eyes of the girl in the cage where you bought the soda checks. She had seen so many happy, healthy boys through that little hole in the wire netting, so many thoughtless boys all eager for their first soda, ...
— A Wodehouse Miscellany - Articles & Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... and it lasted until the Premier was struck down by serious illness in the opening weeks of 1827. In Lord John's opinion, Lord Liverpool was a 'man of honest but narrow views,' and he probably would have endorsed the cynical description of him as the 'keystone rather than the capital' of his own Cabinet. Lord Castlereagh was at the Foreign Office, Lord Sidmouth was Home Secretary, Mr. Vansittart Chancellor of the Exchequer, Lord Palmerston Secretary at War, and Mr. Peel Secretary for Ireland. The political ...
— Lord John Russell • Stuart J. Reid
... may not have been very profound, but he loved this woman at once and finally. It was a love that would have delighted the cynical Schopenhauer and the philosophical Darwin. The instinct of selection had never been more spontaneously and unerringly exercised. He was conscious of neither passion nor sentiment, however. She hovered in his visions as a companion at ...
— The Bell in the Fog and Other Stories • Gertrude Atherton
... to solve the sexual problems of society by inculcating such fear of venereal diseases that men will remain true to the monogamic code of morality? Many cynical disbelievers in sex-hygiene answer this question negatively by asking in biblical phrase, "Can the leopard change his spots?" In other words, these doubting ones believe that sexual instincts are so firmly ...
— Sex-education - A series of lectures concerning knowledge of sex in its - relation to human life • Maurice Alpheus Bigelow
... moralist, and she would infer from my appearance that I had become a cynical sybarite." Roderick had, in fact, a Venetian watch-chain round his neck and a magnificent Roman intaglio on the third finger ...
— Roderick Hudson • Henry James
... criminal methods in order to attain the most charitable ends. The story is a simple one—youth, laughter and love; and the motor car plays an important but not a tiresome part in it. The author's attitude towards women is slightly cynical but very lighthearted, and clearly he loves them all the time: indeed, I think Mr. HAY, while alive to existing faults, loves everything and everybody. In return most people will be prepared to love him. And he deserves to ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 147, August 12, 1914 • Various
... outraged human feeling will never reconcile itself to what Sulla did or suffered others to do. Sulla not only established his despotic power by unscrupulous violence, but in doing so called things by their right name with a certain cynical frankness, through which he has irreparably offended the great mass of the weakhearted who are more revolted at the name than at the thing, but through which, from the cool and dispassionate character of his crimes, he certainly appears to the moral judgment ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... man looked shocked; slowly his pale face took on a look of cynical amusement. "Yes, yes. Certainly. Who more so?" He appeared to hesitate a moment, and then added with a laugh which held a curious tinge of defiance: "In fact, I myself have the honor of being the owner and editor of the ...
— Captivating Mary Carstairs • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... collapse of the commercial world were at hand. He forgot that he had heard quite similar stories twenty years before. Then they had been told by ingenuous youths full of the importance of the information they had just acquired: now they were told by garrulous old gentlemen, with a cynical laugh which was more amusing than the hot-headed asseveration of the juniors. It was, on the whole, a delightful evening, this first evening of his return to club-life; and then it was so convenient to go up stairs to bed instead of ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 90, June, 1875 • Various
... fierceness. Her heart yearned over Thorne, her love rose up and upbraided her for hardness. He was so changed, he had suffered so, his hair was growing gray, hard lines were deepening about his mouth, and to his eyes had come an expression that wrung her heart—a cynical hopelessness, a sullen gloom. Was this her work? Was she shutting out hope from a life, thus making a screen of a scruple to ...
— Princess • Mary Greenway McClelland
... countenance crime. Has it come to the pass that, counting on juggleries of the law, criminals believe that they may kill, maim, burn, and slay as they list without punishment? Is this to be another instance of the law's delays and immunity for a hideous crime, compassed by a cunning and cynical trickster of legal technicalities? The people of Canaan cry out for a speedy trial, speedy conviction, and speedy punishment of this cold-blooded and murderous monster. If he is not dealt with quickly according to his deserts, the climax is upon us and the limit of Canaan's ...
— The Conquest of Canaan • Booth Tarkington
... offensive, we must in justice admit it was never cynical. Had it possessed more satire it would have, perhaps, been more instructive, but there was a bright trait in Sterne's character, that he never accused others. On the contrary, he censures men who, "wishing to be thought witty, and despairing of coming honestly by the title, ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... from Germany and Gaul having played his part of mountebank upon the arena of the world. Eaten up with senseless and cynical vanity, Caius Julius Caesar Caligula desired to be the Caesar of his army as he was princeps and imperator, high pontiff and supreme dictator of the Empire. But as there was no war to conduct, no rebellion to subdue, he had invented a war and harassed some ...
— "Unto Caesar" • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... take the keenness off the edge of school work in the last few years. Because a great number of examiners chosen haphazard turned out to be negligent and incompetent as examiners, because their incapacity created a cynical trade in cramming, a great number of people have come to the conclusion, just as examinations are being improved into efficiency, that all examinations are bad. In particular that excellent method of bringing ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... take it, pray, that you identify yourself with the affair so persistently and violently?" demanded Mr. Galloway, in a cynical tone. And Roland answered with ...
— The Channings • Mrs. Henry Wood
... time, who had been forced into the breach, standing up there for an odious lamplit moment to explain to half a dozen thin benches, where earnest brows were virtuously void of anything so cynical as a suspicion, that we couldn't so much as put a finger on Mr. Saltram. There was nothing to plead but that our scouts had been out from the early hours and that we were afraid that on one of his walks abroad—he took ...
— The Coxon Fund • Henry James
... the Prussian kingdom which his father had left peaceful and prosperous, guarded by a powerful and well-trained army, made secure by a well-filled treasury. Young Frederick was undoubtedly great in intellect and in cynical frankness. He saw his opportunity, he made no pretence of keeping his promises; marching his army forward he seized the nearest Austrian province, the rich and extensive land of Silesia. The other kingdoms rushed to get their share of the spoils; France, Bavaria, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, v. 13 • Various
... length, hands under heads, brains mellowed by brandy, the men summed up the situation. Arved was the first to speak. He was tall, blond, heavy of figure, and his beard hung upon his chest. His dissatisfied eyes were cynical when he rallied his companion. A man of brains this, ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... indifference, and the reputation of witchcraft, with all its penalties, to absolute insignificance? Thus, as they enjoyed the fear inspired among simple neighbours by their imagined traffic with the father of ill, did Madame, I think, relish with a cynical vainglory the suspicion ...
— Uncle Silas - A Tale of Bartram-Haugh • J.S. Le Fanu
... please?" murmured Vane. "Whom do you propose I should engage in mortal combat?" He saw the slight frown on her face and leant forward quickly. "My dear, don't misunderstand me. I don't want to be flippant and cynical. But I'm just a plain, ordinary man—and I'm rather tired. When this show is over I want peace and rest and comfort. And I rather feel that it's up to the damned fools who let us in for it to clear up the mess themselves ...
— Mufti • H. C. (Herman Cyril) McNeile
... meant, and a fellow-feeling made him kind. Even in Venice he set aside a fixed sum for charitable purposes. It was to his credit that neither libertinism nor disgrace nor remorse withered at its root this herb of grace. Cynical speeches with regard to friends and friendship, often quoted to his disadvantage, need not be taken too literally. Byron talked for effect, and in accordance with the whim of the moment. His acts do not correspond with his words. Byron rejected and repudiated bath Protestant and Catholic ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... away his head to hide a cynical smile. He had good reasons for thinking it was not the one he had flung out ...
— Foul Play • Charles Reade
... in any part of the world at a price so low as a shilling a volume.' Far be it from us to make any heartless allusion to the fact that Shakespeare's Sonnets were brought out at fivepence, or that for fourpence-halfpenny one could have bought a Martial in ancient Rome. Every man, a cynical American tells us, has the right to beat a drum before his booth. Still, we must acknowledge that Mr. Walter Scott would have been much better employed in correcting some of the more obvious errors that appear in his series. When, for instance, we come across ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... was great advantage in having spent so many years as Deputy, it is a pity for the sake of the young leader's subsequent elevation that he did not come under the spell of the old chieftain as a candidate before Laurier had begun to grow cynical in office. In 1908 Laurier had been at least three years tired of public life when there was no man to succeed him, and when, as often as he expressed his weariness of trying to govern a nation so temperamentally difficult as Canada, he was ...
— The Masques of Ottawa • Domino
... old, and since 1862 accustomed to undisputed power, demurred to the wish of the Emperor that the other ministers should have access to him directly, and not as heretofore only through the chancellor. It is said too that the matter-of-fact and somewhat cynical Bismarck, had but scanty respect for the mystical view of his grandfather as a saint, that the Emperor everywhere proclaimed. In 1896, the 20th of February, in speaking of his grandfather, he refers to him as: "The Emperor William, that personality which has ...
— Germany and the Germans - From an American Point of View (1913) • Price Collier
... growing in force, and which was destined to hasten the course of the events which he had planned for himself. It is an extraordinary peculiarity in unbelievers that they are often more subject to petty superstitions than other men; and similarly, it often happens that the most cynical and coldly calculating of conspirators, who believe themselves proof against all outward influences, yield to some feeling of nervous dislike for an individual who has never harmed them, and are led on from dislike to hatred, until their soberest actions take colour from ...
— Saracinesca • F. Marion Crawford
... spirit of the gens Claudia. The situation was soon without an issue. The accord of Agrippina with Seneca and Burrhus was troubled, because the two teachers of the young Emperor, under the impression of public malcontent, had somewhat withdrawn from her. Nero, who was sullen, cynical, and lazy, feared his mother too much to have the courage to oppose her openly, but he did not fear her enough to mend his ways. The mother, on her side, was set to do her duty to the end. Like all situations without an issue, this ...
— Characters and events of Roman History • Guglielmo Ferrero
... weak sides of great men, inasmuch as it reads them a valuable lesson on their own infallibility, and tends to lower the molehills of conceit that are raised in the world as stumbling-blocks along every road of petty ambition. It would, however, be but a sorry toil for the most cynical critic to illustrate these vagaries otherwise than so many slips and trippings of the tongue and pen, to which all men are liable in their unguarded moments—from Homer to Anacreon Moore, or Demosthenes to Mr. Brougham. Our course ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 12, No. 334 Saturday, October 4, 1828 • Various
... day, so much at least was clear to him. With that same cynical smile on his lips, he pulled his shivering rags about him, and half unconsciously felt at the growth of beard about his chin. Nobody would recognise him now. His friends (as he had thought them) would pass ...
— Happy Days • Alan Alexander Milne
... girl, and such as are presupposed in the advice of a clergyman, although he may not consider them always appropriate to be put forward. He wished his niece parks, carriages, a title—everything that would make this world a pleasant abode; but he wished her not to be cynical—to be, on the contrary, religiously dutiful, and have warm ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... of a certain cynical tendency to deride the value of a bite that I have decided to spend the evening with my pen. 'A bite!' says somebody, with a fine guffaw. 'And what on earth is the good of a bite, I should like to know? A bite is neither fish, ...
— Mushrooms on the Moor • Frank Boreham
... of the cathedral was cleared at about eleven, and cocked hats and red-striped trousers then became the most noticeable feature. The crowd was jolly and perhaps a little cynical; picture-postcard hawkers made most of the noise, and for some reason or other a forlorn peasant took this opportunity to offer for sale two equally forlorn hedgehogs. Each moment the concourse increased, for it is a ...
— A Wanderer in Florence • E. V. Lucas
... This cynical gipsy phlegm exactly suited Manasseh's mood, and he exerted himself to cheer the poor fellow up, promising to secure his release as soon as he himself should ...
— Manasseh - A Romance of Transylvania • Maurus Jokai
... the romance of small things, including small commonwealths. But to all these Belloc entered like a man armed, and as with a clang of iron. He brought with him news from the fronts of history; that French arts could again be rescued by French arms; that cynical Imperialism not only should be fought, but could be fought and was being fought; that the street fighting which was for me a fairytale of the future was for him a fact of the past. There were many other uses of his genius, but I am speaking ...
— Hilaire Belloc - The Man and His Work • C. Creighton Mandell
... preaching such as this you hope to challenge the respect and get a hold on the intellect of a cynical world? Is it through such instrumentality you would bring home the Church's message to proud and festering humanity? No one can succeed who attempts more than one ...
— The Young Priest's Keepsake • Michael Phelan
... this publication she derived inscrutable solace), so that if Mrs. Foat in person had returned from the summer-land (to which she had some time since taken her flight), she would not have disturbed Mrs. Tarrant's almost cynical equanimity. ...
— The Bostonians, Vol. I (of II) • Henry James
... something tremendously reliable about this man. He had a genius for appearing at the critical moment and for promptly clearing away all difficulties. Almost unconsciously she was forced into comparing him with Maryon Rooke—Rooke, with his curious fascination and detached, half-cynical outlook on life, his beautiful ideals and—Nan's inner self flinched from the acknowledgment—his frequent fallings-short of them. Unwillingly she had to confess to the fact that Maryon was something both of poseur and actor, with an ineradicable ...
— The Moon out of Reach • Margaret Pedler
... expected," replied the General, wonderingly. "His secluded life here has kept him from the wear and tear of the world. It has not made him at all misanthropical or even cynical. His heart is as warm as ever. He spoke very ...
— The Cryptogram - A Novel • James De Mille
... very judicious sovereign; but it has struck us more than once, during the perusal of M. Dumas's wanderings in various lands, that he exhibits a slight, an inconceivably small, tendency to tuft-hunting, hardly consistent with his ultra-liberal principles, and difficult to reconcile with the cynical tone that he habitually adopts in speaking of most existing governments and institutions. To say the truth, we have conceived a great affection for our friend Alexander, and feel every disposition to glide lightly over his faults and exalt his virtues; ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 343, May 1844 • Various
... make UFO reports. At times during the middle of August the telephone lines from the GOC observation posts in Hamilton County (greater Cincinnati) to the filter center in Columbus would be jammed. Now, even the most cynical Air Force types were be-grudgingly raising their eyebrows. These GOC observers were about as close to "experts" as you can get. Many had spent hundreds of hours scanning the skies since the GOC went into the operation in 1952 to close the gaps in our radar net. Many held awards ...
— The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects • Edward Ruppelt
... Ireland in an emigrant ship with a ragged wife and four half starved children clinging to him, with an unquenchable hatred of England in his heart. The hate, it appeared, had lived on in his son, had broken out again in a grandson, dominating the cynical cosmopolitanism of the financial magnate. Bob was vaguely uneasy. He did not like the expression he had seen on Conroy's face. He did not like the tone in which he spoke. But it was obviously absurd to suppose that any one could take seriously the ...
— The Red Hand of Ulster • George A. Birmingham
... long do you give your trumps to sound before your Millennium dawns?" said "little Lucy," feeling strangely old and cynical beside this ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... scientific fact), nor of that weird woman who saw King James the Poet three times with his shroud wrapped ever higher; nor the tale of the finger of the bronze Venus closing over the wedding-ring, whether told by Morris in verse patterned like some tapestry, or by Merimee in terror of cynical reality, or droned by the original mediaeval professional story-teller, none of these are genuine ghost-stories. They exist, these ghosts, only in our minds, in the minds of those dead folk; they have never stumbled and fumbled about, ...
— Hauntings • Vernon Lee
... grow cynical because they are so familiar with matrimonial failures; but most of them, even when they have noticed that many of their friends are unhappily married, become more determined to find, if they can, the secret ...
— The Good Housekeeping Marriage Book • Various
... provide the experience. And he is a devil, not the Devil, conceived as the bitter and malignant enemy of God, but a subordinate spirit whose business it is, in the world-economy, to spur man to activity. This he does partly by cynical criticism and opposition, but more especially by holding out the lures of the sensual life. At first Mephistopheles was not thought of as working solely for a reward in the shape of souls captured for ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... rejoined Lin Tai-yue, with a cynical smile. "But I came out to have a look as I heard a shriek in the heavens; it turned out, in fact, to ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin
... groups, and finally a chairman made some remarks about the Modern Drama and invited a discussion. A dramatic critic made cynical comment on the so-called "uplift plays," which roused Jarvis to indignation. To Bambi's surprise, he was on his feet instantly, and a torrent of words was spilled upon the dramatic critic. He held the attention closely, in an impassioned plea for thoughtful drama, not necessarily ...
— Bambi • Marjorie Benton Cooke
... understand," said Gabriel, "the cynical confession of the Canon Llorente explaining why he became secretary to the Holy Office: 'They began to roast, and in order not to be roasted I took on me the part of roaster.' For intelligent men there was nothing else to be done. How could they resist ...
— The Shadow of the Cathedral • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... among the highest. From various indications, too, it looks as if the time for judging him had come: "Hamlet" is perhaps his most characteristic creation, and Hamlet, in his intellectual unrest, morbid brooding, cynical self-analysis and dislike of bloodshed, is much more typical of the nineteenth or twentieth century than of the sixteenth. Evidently the time for classifying the creator of Hamlet ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris
... pleasantly; but my enjoyment has been independent of that. And still I wonder how much you may be losing, both for yourself and for your writings, by what, in spite of its gaiety and good-nature and genuine sense of the beauty of many things, I must still call a cynical, and therefore exclusive, way of looking at the world. You ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... was holding forth, with cynical good humour, for the benefit, if not the edification of Baron Dangloss, with whom he rode—Mr. Hobbs galloping behind not unlike the faithful Sancho of ...
— Truxton King - A Story of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... which, with cynical enjoyment, Altamont had been on the look-out, came very speedily. One day, Strong being absent upon an errand for his principal, Sir Francis made his appearance in the chambers, and found the envoy of the Nawaub alone. He abused the world in general for ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... Rochester (Edward). Brusque, cynical lover of Jane Eyre. Having married in his early youth a woman who disgraces him and then goes crazy, he shuts her up at Thornhill, and goes abroad. He returns to find a governess there in charge of his child-ward; falls in love with her, and would marry her, but for the discovery of his ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... an hour Ethelbertha retired from the contest, hot, dirty, and a trifle irritable. The fireplace retained the same cold, cynical expression with which it had greeted ...
— Novel Notes • Jerome K. Jerome
... this cynical observation. Another time Courtlandt might have smiled. He pushed his way into the passage leading to the dressing-rooms, and followed its windings until he met a human barrier. To his inquiry the answer was abrupt and perfectly clear in its meaning: La Signorina da Toscana had ...
— The Place of Honeymoons • Harold MacGrath
... Utopia, even were it embodied in practice, would be useless. If the sole result of raising wages were an increase in the consumption of gin, wages might as well stay at a minimum. But the tacit assumption that all changes of human nature are impracticable is simply a cynical and unproved assertion. All of us here hold, I imagine, that human nature has in a sense been changed. We hold that, with all its drawbacks, progress is not an illusion; that men have become at least more tolerant and more humane; that ancient brutalities have ...
— Social Rights and Duties, Volume I (of 2) - Addresses to Ethical Societies • Sir Leslie Stephen
... houses to tremble; the pavements were worn under the tread of hurrying multitudes. The old, leisurely, quizzical look of the faces was lost in something harder and warier; and a cockney type began to emerge discernibly—a cynical young mongrel barbaric of feature, muscular and cunning; dressed in good fabrics fashioned apparently in imitation of the sketches drawn by newspaper comedians. The female of his kind came with him—a pale girl, shoddy and ...
— The Turmoil - A Novel • Booth Tarkington
... and best in all shapes—a longing which haunts me and is the demon which ever impels me to work, and will let me have no rest unless I am doing his behests. The honours of men I value so far as they are evidences of power, but with the cynical mistrust of their judgment and my own worthiness, which always haunts me, I put very little faith in them. Their praise makes me sneer inwardly. God forgive me if I do them any ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 1 • Leonard Huxley
... becomes extraordinarily eloquent. Hatiz, the Persian, could not more warmly, or with choicer figure, describe his mistress' charms, than he does Lion's, or Fowler's, or whatever the brute's Christian name may be; and yet the surly, cynical, dogged expression of the bepraised beast, would almost make one imagine he understood the meaning of his master's words, and that his honest nature despised the flattering encomiums he passes upon his pink belly and legs, his ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Issue 267, August 4, 1827 • Various
... sets in between Christmas and the New Year. It is inevitable; and I should be writing basely if I did not devote to it a full chapter. In those few dark days of inactivity, between a fete and the resumption of the implacable daily round, when the weather is usually cynical, and we are paying in our tissues the fair price of excess, we see life and the world in a grey and sinister light, which we imagine to be the only true light. Take the case of the average successful man of thirty-five. What is he thinking ...
— The Feast of St. Friend • Arnold Bennett
... are invaluable as evidence of the corruption that was already persistent within the primitive community. That which Paul, with the cynical logic of a rabbi, later developed to a conclusion was at bottom merely a process of decay that had begun with the death of the Saviour.—These gospels cannot be read too carefully; difficulties lurk behind every word. I confess—I hope it will not be held against ...
— The Antichrist • F. W. Nietzsche
... introduction to Northumberland House did not prove so complete a failure as the humorous account given by Goldsmith, and the cynical account given by Sir John Hawkins, might lead one to suppose. Dr. Percy, the heir male of the ancient Percies, brought the poet into the acquaintance of his kinswoman, the countess, who, before her marriage with ...
— Oliver Goldsmith • Washington Irving
... the Queen said. "You'd much rather think of yourself as a sort of apprentice lecher, a kind of cynical Don Juan, but—" ...
— Out Like a Light • Gordon Randall Garrett
... Waters around town. Isn't this borough a bower of beauty—a flowery thicket where the prettiest kind in all the world grow under glass or outdoors? And what do you do? You used to pretend to prowl about inspecting the yearly crop of posies, growling, cynical, dissatisfied; but you've even given that up. Now you only point your nose skyward and squall for a mate, and yowl mournfully that you never have seen your ...
— The Tracer of Lost Persons • Robert W. Chambers
... assert that he wanted to fight for liberty, to give his life to the cause of an oppressed nationality. It would be utterly absurd to tell the story of his father's vision, and say that he looked on the South African War as a skirmish preliminary to the Armageddon. Sitting opposite to this cynical man of the world and listening to his talk, Hyacinth came himself to disbelieve in principle. He felt that there must be some baser motive at the bottom of his desire to fight, only, for the life of him, he could not remember what it was. He could not even imagine ...
— Hyacinth - 1906 • George A. Birmingham
... him change, too, or perhaps more truly become himself. Still apparently the old Chris, handsome, poised, cynical, and only too ready to be bored, he went his usual course of golf and polo, gave his men's dinners, kissed Alice good-bye and departed for yachting or motoring trips. Even Alice, shut away from reality in her own world of music and ...
— The Beloved Woman • Kathleen Norris
... sun was conquering me, and I was looking hopelessly for a place to sleep, when a cart drawn by two oxen at about one mile an hour came creaking by. The driver was asleep, his head on the shady side. The devil tempted me, and without one struggle against temptation, nay with cynical and congratulatory feelings, I jumped up behind, and putting my head also on the shady side (there were soft sacks for a bed) I very ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... leave behind. The present came to him with friendly greeting. He was unconsciously, perhaps inevitably, unjust to what it brought. The injustice reacted upon himself, and developed by degrees into the cynical mood of fancy which became manifest in 'Fifine at ...
— Life and Letters of Robert Browning • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... ridiculous will have taken its place. It is not sensible; what is worse, it is not to my mind respectable. Do not imagine that I object to humour in conversation. That is a very different thing. I have made humourous remarks myself before now, mostly of rather a cynical and sarcastic kind. ...
— Eliza • Barry Pain
... each other's old habits, and one friar goes about darned because of another's rending, so the poet of a certain order grows cynical for the sake of many poets' old loves. Not otherwise will the resultant verse succeed in implying so much—or rather so many, in the feminine plural. The man of very sensitive individuality might hesitate at the adoption. The Franciscan is understood to have a fastidiousness ...
— Essays • Alice Meynell
... there was passion enough deep seated in her bosom; she suffered from no transcendentalism; she saw nothing through a halo of poetic inspiration: among the various tints of her atmosphere there was no rose colour; she preferred wit to poetry; and her smile was cynical rather than joyous. ...
— The Bertrams • Anthony Trollope
... "that is true enough; but if that cynical quotation of yours has anything in it, it's equally true, isn't it, that friendship is a matter of cabs, and street cars, and the elevated road? Of course, we can hardly be expected to look you up, but Sixty-ninth Street isn't exactly in California, ...
— David Harum - A Story of American Life • Edward Noyes Westcott |
